Nikon F55

This is the Nikon F55, sold as the N55
in the United States. I'm a fan of plastic
consumer SLRs, and so when I saw this one on eBay for £7 (yes, seven
pounds) I
couldn't turn it down, if only so my D2H
wouldn't be so lonely, surrounded by hostileCanongear
as it usually is.

This was one of Nikon's last consumer film SLR cameras, built in 2002;
only the consumer F75 and professional F6 succeed it, and it's unlikely that
we'll see any more. It's pretty much what you'd expect from a modern
plastic autofocus film SLR.

Non-TL;DR summary

If you're too lazy to read the rest of this page, then here's a
summary. The good:

Tiny and weighs nothing. The body weighs
350 grams; that's less than half of a
Canon T90, or precisely a
third of a battery-less Nikon
D2H.

Dead-on matrix metering and dead-on
autofocus. Of all the cameras I
own (and these are only a few of them),
this is the only one I've trusted with my last opportunity
to shoot Kodachrome in late 2010.

Reliable. How do I know this? It's only a few
years old, that's how! As a snapshooter's camera, most of these would
have only had a few rolls put through them before they were
retired in favour of digital cameras. I'd expect at least a decade
of flawless service out of one of these -- again, a reason I
trusted it with my two and only rolls of Kodachrome in 2010.

And now the bad. Remember, it's easy for me to complain about
stuff, but the thing is, I don't even think about any of this
stuff while shooting, so you don't have any excuse.

Looks stupid. You risk looking like a tourist
with one of these.

Limited lens compatibility. You'll get no
autofocus with AF-S and AF-I lenses (only old-school screw-type
lenses will work. You'll get no metering with AI, AI-S and Series
E lenses. VR does not work either.

Flash sucks. Read on for the gory details,
but the built-in flash is for nuking subjects with direct flash
indoors, not for fill flash in daylight.

No AF lock.

Fake it by flicking it over to manual focus
once you've focused. There's no AE lock either; use fully manual
mode if you need control over this.

No DOF preview button. I find these to be
mostly useless anyway.

Body

All plastic and 350 grams (minus batteries, and a
lens). Yup, plastic includes the lens mount. I love cheap plastic
cameras like this. I've carried bricks like the
Canon T90 and the Nikon
D2H around my neck for nine or more hours at a time, and I'll assure you
that is not very fun at all. Plastic cameras like the
cute little F55 are an absolute blast to carry around, because
you don't notice that they're there. Sure, if you're an even worse
gear-abusing idiot than me, then you'll end up breaking one. Who cares?
Buy 10 of them and you'll probably end up spending less money than you
would on any of the "serious" bodies.

It's also really, really small. Smaller than my other plastic
miracle Pentax ZX-M. The lens
you see in the picture at the top is a 50mm f/1.8, which is a very compact
little lens. My D2H swallows a 50mm
f/1.8 like me swallowing lasagna. Mmm, tasty, tasty lasagna.

You know what? I'm going to stick another cute comparison pic in
here:

CAMERA SNUGGLE! :D

The only downside is that it's silver, not black. Of course, this is a
conspiracy on Nikon's part; they don't want the biggest suckers (image-conscious
photographers) to buy great little cameras cheaply, since nobody takes
silver cameras seriously. I wonder what it would look like sprayed pink.

Metering & modes

You get programmed automatic, aperture priority, shutter priority
and fully manual modes. You also get a bunch of silly scene modes, and
a very rude "Auto" mode which is like programmed automatic but without a
shiftable program, and will pop the flash without you asking.

Given that it's Nikon's matrix metering system, I'd expect exposure to
be bang-on accurate, even on slide film. I've only shot negative film
with it, which is hugely tolerant to poor exposure, so ignore me.

You can't set the ISO manually, so if you don't have a DX coded film
you'll be shooting it at ISO 100, I believe. Who cares? Do non-DX-coded
films even exist anymore?

Red and blue, II. Nikon F55 and
Nikon AF 50mm f/1.8D shooting Kodak Portra 400VC. Yup, that's a
portrait film; I ran out of Ektar and that's what I had kicking around
at the time, so there. Also, my fingers keep wanting to spell it
"Porta".

Ergonomics

Pretty good. Even if it's a bit small for my hands,
it's a breeze to operate. The only thing it's missing is
a control dial at the front to operate the aperture in aperture-priority
mode (you use the rear dial instead). Same as Canon SLRs on this count,
which makes more sense to me and I prefer it.

I could nit-pick and say that the all-silver buttons are awkward
to read, that the grippy covering isn't really grippy (almost hard plastic),
and that I'd like the autofocus point selection button (which
I don't need) moved somewhere else so my fingers don't confuse it with
the exposure compensation button (which I do need). Or do away with it
altogether; I could happily live with just one AF point, rather than
the three, uselessly-tightly-packed ones of the F55. Then again, it's
a cheap plastic SLR camera, so who cares?

Viewfinder

Lens compatibility

You'll only get everything (autofocus and metering) with old school
screw-type AF lenses. It won't autofocus with AF-S lenses, and won't even
meter with AI and AI-S manual focus lenses.

Vibration reduction (VR) won't work on any lens. This makes sense;
Nikon's VR lenses were (and to a lesser extent, still are, on full-frame
cameras) big, professional telephoto lenses that an F55 would never
encounter.

I was in a silly mood so I tried putting my 18-55mm DX and 55-200
DX VR on them. Despite being designed for the smaller sensor of digital
cameras, lo and behold, vignetting wasn't noticeable at the longer focal
lengths. Curiously, the camera refused to recognise the 18-55mm at all
(the finder reads F-- and won't fire in anything but fully manual mode).

The kit came with a 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6 zoom lens. By all accounts this
is a stupidly good lens, but I use it with Nikon's superb
50mm f/1.8D for being tiny and cheap (£100 shipped).

Autofocus

It's surprisingly fast. It's always dead-on accurate when it hits,
but sometimes doesn't hit at all and hunts a lot on low-contrast
subjects like skies. Speed is limited
by the fact you can only use old screw-type AF lenses, but for the still
subjects that film is good for (I prefer my ancient D2H for anything
that moves), it's more than fast enough.

It doesn't have an autofocus lock, as such. Rather, it detects whether
your subject is moving or not, and if it is, it'll automatically switch
between continuous autofocus (tracking a subject's motion) and single-shot
(focusing and locking on the subject, allowing you to focus and recompose
for a subject that's way off-center). The great thing is? This actually
works! It's not, from my tests with still subjects and my rapidly-moving
dog, easily fooled by camera movement.

You can pretend that you have an AF lock by focusing, then flicking
it over to manual focus. I'd still prefer a proper AF lock button, but
that's just me.

Nikon call the autofocus circuits in the F55 "Multi-CAM530" to make it
sound like serious business. If they're consistent in their nomclemature,
this is the same system used in the D40 and D5000.

Flash

The 1/90 flash sync speed is basically useless for the
latter. On a bright day at ISO 100, you'll have to stop
way the hell down to get down (at least
f/16 or f/22 at ASA 100, by my quick and probably inccurate
calculations) which, if it doesn't overwhelm the built-in
flash, will drastically sap its power (and your batteries).

What makes this worse is that you get no TTL
flash metering with external flash guns (even Nikon's very
own), so you can't even make up for stopping down so far
by sticking a massive external flash gun on it (unless you
feel like doing a bunch of calculations in your head). Not that
you'd want to stick a massive external flash gun on it; that'd
double the weight of your setup and that'd defeat the whole
point of using a silly plastic SLR in the first place.

On the other hand, if you do find a situation in which
you need (and can use) the built-in flash, Nikon's TTL
flash metering should be perfect, as it has been on all
recent Nikons.

Batteries

Two CR2s, same as the other
plastic miracle in my armoury. Without flash, Nikon rate it
for 45 rolls of 36-exposure film at 20° C, or 27 at -10&deg C.

CR2s are CR2s. I usually use Energizer or some other brand name for the
guarantee (if the batteries wreck your camera, they'll replace it). With
that said, I also picked up some very cheap
Eunicell batteries to see if they
would explode (they haven't). I like the strained English on their
website, like
this:

Our mission: create value and create satisfaction. All Euni people, Euni
families, Euni customers and fellows around Euni are team working and
hardworking, enjoying beautiful lives. Euni has a positive influence upon
Chinese nation, even upon the world.

Honesty is to devote themselves to their duties, to be clean and
efficient, to gather limited financial power to develop the company at a
maximum extent. Credit and simplicity are guidelines of relationship between
employees and employees, employees and the company, also is the necessarily
basic morality of Euni people.

Buying one

Why not? I did. I bought this for seven quid, mostly because
I thought it was funny, but it turns out that it's actually an excellent
performer and incredibly fun to boot. If you've already got a screw-type
AF lens kicking around, there's no reason to not get one if you
can find it at the right price.